We won't save ourselves. We might slow the process, but the information environment is permanently altered and we can't put it back.

The information asymmetry between individuals and the powerful is permanently reversed.

Thinking about it in terms of the monopoly of violence being the root of power negotiations; typically a resistance movement has more information about the state/colonizer than vice versa, because power has to be visible - guerilla warfare thrives on this.

That's gone. The powerful will have complete detailed information and automatic analysis.

The medium is the message.

There will always be some form of underground.

What's different is that, for a while, the early Internet age (and a little bit earlier - Usenet etc) made that underground very accessible. Now we're reverting back to the original situation where it was very much shunned and criminalized.

> UK showed how to deal with civil disobedience (fast tracked judicial process)

What is it you mean by this?

I see so many offhand comments about the dystopian UK here but AFAICT there’s a lot of noise and very little meat. The only thing I can think you mean is the UK is currently debating a bill to limit jury trials to more serious offences. While I do find that pretty offensive, there’s nothing fast track about any of its justice system at the moment.

On the contrary, people are waiting years for trial, which is bad for the accused because they have it hanging over them, and bad for victims who get no swift resolution.

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> and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more with my younger family at least.

Which is funny as thats what I heard from my older family growing up. Except it's a lie and they have plenty to hide!

"Pass me your phone, I want to screenshot a few things and post on social media".

And the overwhelming majority of anything running Android.

HN is mostly for people with entrepreneur spirit, not hacker spirit - entrepreneurs who want to be known as hackers. The difference is vast.

That was almost 5 years ago. Lately, though, I see more people have stopped tolerating these attacks on freedom. See pewdiepie, louis rossman, deflock, piracy ressurection. Uk petition against digital ID becomes one of the largest petitions in history.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194

You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children. The age verification bills I've read have steep penalties for retaining information, so that seems fine since that's literally more protection than you get in person.

It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected. Except of course ideas for forcing OS behavior coming out of California which are obviously bad.

I actually think things could be a lot simpler if we just made the laws like alcohol: it's illegal (with criminal liability) for a non-parent adult to provide <restricted thing> to a child. Simple enough. Seems to work fine as-is for Internet alcohol purchases. Businesses dealing in restricted industries can figure out how to avoid that liability. That's entirely compatible with making it illegal for businesses to stalk everyone, which we should also do!

I don't know why I'm the only person online willing to steelman this, but...

The early Internet users weren't people who subscribed to AOL to look at porn in the 90's. They were the people who were granted access to the ARPANET to work in the 80's. The Internet was an exclusive community back then. You had government employees, knowledge workers, and elite university students who had all passed institutional screening processes. You were only allowed to use the ARPANET if you were using it to do something useful and aligned. Therefore you could feel reasonably assured that anyone you talked to online was going to be better than the average person you'd find going outside and walking down the street. If you wanted to know who they were, you could just finger their username. If you wanted to know who owned a domain, you could whois it, get their name and then even write them mail or call them.

People have wanted that old Internet back for a long time. i.e. the one that existed before Eternal September. Those are the people who run your tech companies. The ones who remember what it was like. These people understand what people actually want isn't always the same thing as what they say they want. They understand why the only truly successful Internet spaces on the modern Internet are the ones like Facebook that got people to be non-anonymous. Another example is the best places to work that folks desperately want to get into are the companies like Google whose intranets are much more like the old Internet. These are really the only Internet spaces that normal people want to use. Because people want to interact with other people who are similar to them. Because people want to know who other people are. Otherwise we can't operate as the social creatures that evolution designed us to be. I don't think any civilization in history has operated its public square as a gigantic red light district where everyone is required to wear a mask. So why should we?

Overcoming the anonymous religion problem that somehow glommed onto the hacker and cyberpunk movements is more important and urgent now than it's ever been, because the Internet has been filling up with billions of AI agents. It's gonna be Eternal September in overdrive. Humanity is really facing a tradeoff where you'll have to have gatekeeping again and won't be allowed to conceal who you are, or you can be gaslit by machines forever in your own robot fantasy.

> They haven’t lived in a context where they need to care.

You might believe you don't need opsec, and then new laws are passed, or your national supreme court overturns the case that gave you your rights, or someone invades; and now suddenly you're wanted for anything from overstaying a visa, outright murder, or simply existing.

USA, right now, peoples lives are being destroyed because the wrong people got their data. Lethal consequences exist in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran.

Certain professions per definition: Journalists, Lawyers, Intelligence, Military.

Certain Ethnicities. (Jewish, Somali) ; Faiths...

It doesn't need to be quite this dramatic though. But you might accidentally have broken some laws and don't even know about it yet. Caught a fish? Released a fish? Give the wrong child a bowl of soup [1]. Open the door, refuse to open the door. Signed a register; didn't sign a register. The list of actual examples is endless. The less people know about you, the less they can prosecute.

[1] A flaw in the Dutch Asylum Emergency Measures Act (2025) that would have criminalized offering even a bowl of soup to an undocumented person. The Council of State confirmed this reading. A follow-up bill was needed to fix it.

I have the right to my own senses, my own observations, my own memories. I have the right to photograph what I can see with my eyes, and to write down what I can remember. Unless enjoined by a specific duty of care (doctor/patient, attorney/client, security clearance, etc) I have the right to discuss my memories with others. This obtains even when using electronic tools and even when working in association with others.

I don’t intend to give up or accept limitations on these rights because you consider yourself to have “privacy rights” or ownership interests in my records, my memories, my perceptions, or the reality in front of me. I find the notion of the government or another person interfering in this process, the perception and recollection of reality, to be creepy and totalitarian by itself.

In 1984, it is not only that the government is aware of Winston, but that it routinely tampers with or destroys evidence of the past & demands to control the perception of the present. I do not think we should let a government do that, even for a good reason like “protect your privacy” any more than we should let it destroy general purpose computing “for the children.”

There are many people rights people don't have and they're okay with that and even support not having the right to stab people, not having the right to steal from a store, not having the right to take nude pictures of children... What if this one is like that?

It should be prohibited outright. If you allow a loophole for corporations then they will just sell it as a service and we will never be free of it.

Companies create the environment - the government is supposed to be “small” - and it must remain small so the US “consumer” can be leeched from

"morals of the general public" helps lead to "more aggressive privacy laws"

Yes - you buy the house in the bay, and companies will lock you in with the vesting schedule. Just another 3, 4 years and you’ll be rich enough to afford a second one, or retire early. Some people can self justify what they do, or pretend because they work in a “nicer” part of a company than the core revenue part that it’s all okay that what pays their checks is mass behavior manipulation. I don’t like ads or social coercion, at all.

I'm here wondering why it would make a difference whether the girl is under 18 or not. You could argue that the criminal has to cover up his crime by getting rid of the evidence (murder) because the girl wasn't 18 yet and therefore it makes sense to stop under 18 year old girls from using the platform because they are living evidence, but it actually sounds more like a problem caused by the law itself.

After all, dating apps are an even more extreme version of this. If you're attractive enough, you get to have many one night stands and many murder opportunities.

I live in extremely fire prone areas.

Many of us are pretty damn okay at beating back the flame and controlling the flow of the worst of things away from homes, but nobody is perfect.

We don't expect every family and parent in these areas to have fire fighting skills, self evacuation is recommended.

Parents every where now find themselves surrounded by the delibrately laid gasoline of addictive social media and grooming risks et al. and it's infeasible to expect every parent be skilled in defensive cyber secuirty.

It's reasonable to expect communities to want simple barriers and means of protection, the existance of reasonable control and throttling options for parents.

Some of them clearly are - the one in California.